Diffusion Language Model with Query-Document Relevance for Query-Focused Summarization

Abstract

Query-Focused Summarization (QFS) aims to generate summaries from source documents that can answer specific queries. Although the QFS task has gained increasing attention recently, its development is constrained by the fact that mainstream QFS models are BART variants, which are autoregressive and suffer from long-term dependencies and exposure bias. To address these problems, we adopt a diffusion language model that performs well in non-autoregressive scenarios to effectively resolve issues related to autoregressive methods. However, QFS requires guidance from queries to generate adequate summaries, while diffusion language models have limited sensitivity to queries. In this paper, we propose QFS-DLM, a non-autoregressive diffusion language model that incorporates query-document fragment relevance and query-document global relevance to enhance the adaptability of QFS tasks. Firstly, we extract key fragments from documents based on queries and assign higher weights to them, thereby emphasizing crucial and continuous information within the document. Secondly, we calculate global relevance scores between queries and documents, and then integrate these scores into the model’s loss function, enabling the model to prefer high-quality data and distance itself from low-quality data. Overall, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on Debatepedia and PubMedQA datasets in ROUGE scores, GPT-4, and human evaluations.